Skills

We will spend a large portion of our class time learning and practicing skills used by historians to understand and analyze primary source documents and interpret the past. These are reading and critical thinking skills you will use in high school, college, and your future careers.

Because these skills build on one another, each skill quiz will include all of the skills we have covered to that point. For instance, the first quiz only covers Observation and Inference. The second quiz covers Observation/Inference and Sourcing.

Skill grades will reflect the student’s mastery according to their latest score for each skill using the 3 point scale below:

3 = Proficient: Got it! You showed you have this skill!

2 = Emergent: You mostly get this but you need to practice something.

1 = Basic: You missed something big and need some reteaching.

0 = You didn’t try. Your answers were blank in this section.

Click on the links below for the rubric for that skill, and practice questions*.

Observation - Specific details you gather about a document or artifact.

Inference - A working or developing theory about what the source means based on observations and background information.

Sourcing - Identifying relevant information about the author or source of an account and evaluating the account's reliability.

Evidence - Identify relevant, specific evidence from an account and justify how it supports a claim.

Claim - Creating a specific defensible statement that is supported by evidence from historical accounts.

Corroboration - Compare and contrast multiple accounts and connect which accounts would support or refute a specific claim. .

Contextualization - Putting the account in the correct historical setting and analyzing how the circumstances surrounding the account affect our interpretation of the account.